Meeting the Challenge of Doing an RCT Evaluation of Youth Mentoring in Ireland: A Journey in Mixed Methods: A journey in mixed methods

The youth mentoring program Big Brothers Big Sisters is one of the first social interventions involving youth in Ireland to be evaluated using a randomized controlled trial methodology. This article sets out the design process undertaken, describing how the research team came to adopt a concurrent embedded mixed methods design as a means of balancing ethical, feasibility, and scientific issues associated with the randomized controlled trial method, establishing an epistemological position and integrating data from various methods and multiple sources.